Parricide

Sociz (Johnny) Junatanov says he could not run away from the father who he says chained, beat, threatened and humiliated him for 18 years. But there came a day when, finally, "it was too much. I felt I was going to explode," and he decided that killing his tormentor was the only way out. However, the father survived a stabbing and an injection of battery acid, and the son was arrested after trying to hire an undercover cop to finish the job with a rifle.

The crime scene photos were enough to make jurors blanch: a red-haired woman's head and hands tucked into an unzipped duffel bag. But jurors in the murder trial of Jason Victor Bautista, who is accused of choking and dismembering his mother two years ago, seemed just as repulsed by the defendant's testimony that his mother routinely pummeled him with her fists, beat him with a hockey stick and held him at knifepoint for hours because he got a B in a high school class.

For almost two weeks, jurors in the retrial of the Menendez brothers have been focusing on the bloody details of parricide, replayed shot by shot and larger than life. It has been grim work. They have heard the chilling, metallic clicks of a 12-gauge Mossberg shotgun similar to the alleged murder weapons; they have seen the blood-encrusted polo shirt Jose Menendez wore when he died. And countless autopsy photos have been projected on a courtroom screen.

Sociz (Johnny) Junatanov says he could not run away from the father who he says chained, beat, threatened and humiliated him for 18 years. But there came a day when, finally, "it was too much. I felt I was going to explode," and he decided that killing his tormentor was the only way out. However, the father survived a stabbing and an injection of battery acid, and the son was arrested after trying to hire an undercover cop to finish the job with a rifle.

The crime scene photos were enough to make jurors blanch: a red-haired woman's head and hands tucked into an unzipped duffel bag. But jurors in the murder trial of Jason Victor Bautista, who is accused of choking and dismembering his mother two years ago, seemed just as repulsed by the defendant's testimony that his mother routinely pummeled him with her fists, beat him with a hockey stick and held him at knifepoint for hours because he got a B in a high school class.

July 22, 1990 | JOHN JOHNSON and RONALD L. SOBLE, John Johnson and Ronald L. Soble, Times staff writers, are working on a book about the Menendez case for New American Library.

ON A MILD SUNDAY last summer, a string of "popping sounds" drifted through the lazy night air of Beverly Hills around 10 o'clock. "I didn't think anything of it," said Tom Zlotow, a neighbor who soon learned that the noises he'd heard from the house right behind his were echoes of the most sensational crime in the history of Beverly Hills. "I didn't even think it could be gunfire, especially around here."

It was a daily ritual. Lonnie Dutton washed down sedatives with homemade beer and then beat and kicked his four young children with steel-toed boots in a slovenly central Oklahoma mobile home hidden behind oak and wild plum trees. There, he once forced his two oldest boys to throw darts at their little sister and mother, bellowing: "By God, you throw 'em hard!" relatives recalled. When his wife cried out, he poured jalapeno juice in her eyes, yelling: "I'll give you something to cry about!"

On the outskirts of Allentown, Pa., in late February two teen-age boys were arrested in the stabbing and bludgeoning deaths of their parents and their 11-year-old brother. A few days later and only four miles away, a 16-year-old was arrested in connection with the shooting deaths of his mother and father. Investigators found a note they say is from the teen: "I want a movie to be made for me after I kill everyone."

The murder trial of brothers Lyle and Erik Menendez, charged with the shotgun slayings of their parents, promises to be a key test of an emerging legal strategy that portrays abused children as victims, akin to battered women, and justified in killing in self-defense. Both brothers will argue that their father sexually abused them for years, according to a defense lawyer and other sources.

With a pained expression and often fighting tears during his second day of testimony, Erik Menendez told the jury Thursday at his murder retrial what it was like to grow up a Menendez. "It was cruel at times," he said, as his older brother, Lyle, looked on from the defense table. Often, he said, his father called him a sissy or coward and told him he wasn't worthy of the family name. In his family, Erik Menendez told the jury, his father groomed him for success--and for sex.

OEDIPUS AT FENWAY PARK: What Rights Are and Why There Are Any by Lloyd L. Weinreb (Harvard University Press: $29.95; 221 pp.). Books about rights, as Harvard Law School professor Lloyd Weinreb notes in his introduction to this volume, appear with almost appalling frequency these days. One reason is that rights are so hard to define: one person's right is another person's wrong, just as the right to swing one's arm is limited by a neighboring nose.

Paul Mones pulls a handwritten letter from an office brimming with paper and reads aloud. It's from one of his clients--a teen-age boy imprisoned for murdering a parent. "It's still a hard question of why I did it," he wrote. "I sincerely hope that other kids out there will have someone to talk to like I have. If it's possible, maybe we can set up a correspondence net throughout the United States for kids like us. Who knows, it just might help in getting over the guilt I know we all feel."